Nicolae Minovici is one of the most important names in the history of medicine in Romania, especially in Bucharest. An exceptional doctor, skilled in pedagogy and passionate about art, he laid the foundations for two essential institutions for public health: the first Emergency Hospital in the country and the first ambulance service, called Societatea Salvarea. This article focuses on the latter project, explaining how the idea came to him and what the conditions for rescuing the injured were over a century ago.

Who was doctor Nicolae Minovici

Dr. Nicolae Minovici can undoubtedly be considered a pioneer and visionary in modernizing medical and sanitary services in Romania, bringing them up to the European standards of the time. 

Thanks to his efforts and vision, both the first emergency hospital and the first ambulance service in Bucharest were established. After completing studies in psychiatry in Berlin and Paris and becoming a forensic doctor, Minovici witnessed numerous accidents and victims, serving as deputy director at the Medico-Legal Institute.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the conditions for accident victims were almost nonexistent in Bucharest. Those seriously injured, suffering from hemorrhages or fractures, required immediate assistance to prevent massive blood loss. 

Often, victims were transported with difficulty by carriage drivers, who refused to dirty their vehicles with blood. In the absence of alternatives, the wounded were carried on arms or on sacks, in conditions that were hardly hygienic.

The first Romanian ambulance

In 1906, at the international exhibition celebrating forty years of King Carol I’s reign, Minovici saw an ambulance belonging to the Vienna Rescue Society. Fascinated by this innovation, he developed a strong desire to provide Bucharest with a similar ambulance. 

With great difficulty and only through subsidies, he managed to commission an ambulance from the Rieber workshop, known for manufacturing luxury carriages. 

The Rieber workshop understood the importance of the project and offered a nominal price, while Minovici raised funds from influential friends to finance the first horse-drawn ambulance designed for emergency medical interventions.

Societatea Salvarea was officially established on July 28, 1906, funded by Dr. Minovici himself. These funds were not sufficient to acquire a headquarters, so Mrs. Cazzavillan, the wife of Luigi Cazzavillan, director and founder of the newspaper Universul, provided the “Theodora L. Cazzavillan” asylum, located on the banks of the Dâmbovița River.

The asylum, consisting of two wings and two main facades, had been specially built to be donated to a noble cause. Its front courtyard was transformed into a beautifully landscaped garden, while the rooms were tastefully furnished and kept in immaculate cleanliness.

The Societatea Salvarea Project

At the entrance stood the guardhouse, where residents were prepared to leave at the first call to assist accident victims. In the left wing, where the Society operated, the ground floor housed the duty doctor’s room and a room for providing first aid. 

Here were medical instruments, beds, and sickbeds. The next room was a classroom, where doctors trained police officers in first aid, later becoming the “Samaritan School”. Upstairs, two large rooms served as dormitories for residents and staff.

Above the guardhouse was a beautiful room reserved for society committee meetings. All rooms were impeccably clean and orderly, and the furniture, custom-made for the society, had been donated by industrialists without any conditions—a gesture widely appreciated in the press at the time. 

The newspaper Universul wrote: “This deed is praiseworthy, and all those who contributed to equipping the premises can be sure that they helped intelligently in establishing the rescue society.”

Within about a year, Societatea Salvarea grew rapidly and became well-known among Bucharest residents, who observed that the ambulance would reach the scene within just a few minutes of being called. 

A humorous anecdote from the time says that if a house caught fire, people would call the rescue service first before the firefighters, which often annoyed them because the ambulance would arrive before their trucks. The trust of Bucharest residents in the society’s teams was enormous.

How did patient transport work

Even if the injured were immediately taken by the ambulance, it traveled at a steady trot of the horses, accompanied by the trumpet sound of the medic seated on the carriage. The prefecture had issued orders for all vehicles to give way to allow the ambulance to pass. 

Upon arrival at the scene, the patient was taken to the hospital, usually Filantropia. Unfortunately, sometimes the surgeon would refuse the patient out of convenience, and the ambulance had to go to other hospitals, such as Colentina or Colțea. Meanwhile, the patient could suffer fatal hemorrhages and even die in the ambulance. 

In such cases, the deceased was brought to the Medico-Legal Institute, where Minovici worked. This experience led him to establish a dedicated emergency hospital alongside Societatea Salvarea, so that patients could be operated on immediately after being picked up by the ambulance.

Starting in 1908, Nicolae Minovici conducted visits to several European countries—including the Netherlands, Hungary, and Germany—to study how the injured, the needy, and abandoned children were treated. These journeys contributed to the formation of a modern vision of emergency medical care.

To replace horse-drawn ambulances, Dr. Minovici imported motorized ambulances from Germany, making interventions faster and more efficient. Moreover, he introduced state-of-the-art medical equipment for the time, such as hermetically sealed waterproof envelopes, which were used in cases such as childbirth.

Unfortunately, both the emergency hospital and Societatea Salvarea were destroyed by German bombings during their retreat from Bucharest in World War I. Consequently, these two vital institutions were forced to relocate, continuing to serve as the foundation for emergency medical services in the Romanian capital.

Nicolae Minovici thus remains a landmark figure in Romanian medical history—a visionary who combined his passion for medicine, art, and pedagogy with civic spirit, transforming the way accident victims were assisted and saved. 

Societatea Salvarea was not just the first ambulance in Bucharest, but the beginning of a tradition that shaped emergency medical services for generations to come.

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